The present invention relates to an apparatus using outline font in which the shape of a character is expressed by coordinates of the outline of the shape.
Upon developing a character bitmap on the basis of character data coded in outline form (outline font data), information on outline coordinate values (called "outline coordinate information", hereinafter) as well as information on linewidth correction (called "linewidth correction information", hereinafter) used for correcting linewidth of a character to be filled in color is also used so as to keep the shape of the character in good quality.
However, there is a problem in which the shape of the character cannot be generated in good quality by using only the linewidth correction information since it is not possible to prevent all the character strike to be unique, thereby there are cases where quality of the character is deteriorated.
For example, when the size of outline data of a character whose shape is shown in FIG. 29A is changed and the outline data is developed into a character bitmap, the shape of the character may become as shown in FIG. 29B. More specifically, the widths of lines may be maintained, however, the spaces between the lines may differ from those of the original character. When the character expressed as the bitmap shown in FIG. 29B is printed, the narrow spaces between lines will not be expressed and two lines will be printed as a thick single line.
In order to overcome the aforesaid problem, there is a method for correcting spaces between lines of a character. However, in a case where there are a plurality of spaces, between lines in a character, to be corrected, the quality of the character depends upon the distances between the lines. Accordingly, it is necessary to take the priority order of the spaces to be corrected into consideration.